th century that the bones
of St. Louis, having come into fashion, wrought multitudes of cures,
while in the fourteenth, having become unfashionable, they ceased to
act, and gave place for a time to the relics of St. Roch of Montpellier
and St. Catherine of Sienna, which in their turn wrought many cures
until they too became out of date and yielded to other saints. Just so
in modern times the healing miracles of La Salette have lost prestige in
some measure, and those of Lourdes have come into fashion.(314)

(314) For one of these lists of saints curing diseaes, see Pettigrew,
On Superstitions connected with Medicine; for another, see Jacob,
Superstitions Populaires, pp. 96-100; also Rydberg, p. 69; also Maury,
Rambaud, and others. For a comparison of fashions in miracles with
fashions in modern healing agents, see Littre, Medecine et Medecins, pp.
118, 136 and elsewhere; also Sprengel, vol. ii, p. 143.

Even such serious matters as fractures, calculi, and difficult
parturition, in which modern science has achieved some of its greatest
triumphs, were then dealt with by relics; and to this hour the ex votos
hanging at such shrines as those of St. Genevieve at Paris, of St.
Antony at Padua, of the Druid image at Chartres, of the Virgin at
Einsiedeln and Lourdes, of the fountain at La Salette, are survivals of
this same conception of disease and its cure.

So, too, with a multitude of sacred pools, streams, and spots of earth.
In Ireland, hardly a parish has not had one such sacred centre; in
England and Scotland there have been many; and as late as 1805 the
eminent Dr. Milner, of the Roman Catholic Church, gave a careful
and earnest account of a miraculous cure wrought at a sacred well in
Flintshire. In all parts of Europe the pious resort to wells and springs
continued long after the close of the Middle Ages, and has not entirely
ceased to-day. It is not at all necessary to suppose intentional
deception in the origin and maintenance of all fetich cures. Although
two different judicial investigations of the modern miracles at La
Salette have shown their origin tainted with fraud, and though the
recent restoration of the Cathedral of Trondhjem has revealed the fact
that the healing powers of the sacred spring which once brought such
great revenues to that shrine were assisted by angelic voices spoken
through a tube in the walls, not unlike the pious machinery discovered
in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, there is